Media Can't Decide If 2.4 Percent Is Dramatic or Ho-Hum
The media are always trying to find a way to report the bad side of economic news, so it's shouldn't come as a terrible surprise to anyone that they managed to make positive holiday sales growth a bad thing.According to MasterCard SpendingPulse, retail sales were up 3.6 percent during the holiday season - 2.4 percent excluding gas prices. But because it's not as big an increase as recent years…
'Tis the Season for Post-Christmas Bias at the New York Times
Does the New York Times let bias creep into its post-Christmas reports on the shopping season just completed? Smart-aleck answer: Is Maureen Dowd obsessed with Dick Cheney? (His name appears in 295 of her columns, all but four appearing during the last seven-plus years. That would be almost 40 Cheney inclusions per year, probably close to half the number of columns she has written during that…
Dan Gainor Praises Velshi, Golodryga on FBN
Business & Media Institute Director Dan Gainor appeared on the Fox Business Network December 21, 2007, to discuss the media's coverage of the economy. Full of Christmas spirit, Gainor had kind words for two mainstream reporters."Even in the mainstream media there are people who get it. Looking back this year one of the big stars whose improvement was surprising is CNN's Ali Velshi who…
Huckabee and Edwards: Same Struggle
Merry Christmas to all our NB community!Politico is having some snarky fun, running a "populist pop quiz" challenging readers to guess whether it was John Edwards or Mike Huckabee who made the variety of class-warfare claims listed. You'll find a sampling of four of the questions below, but I'd encourage people to take the entire eight-question quiz and report back your scores. A cyber-statue…
US Economy So Bad Illegal Aliens Heading Back to Mexico
Just how bad is the economy doing? Well, according to Reuters, it's so bad out there that illegal aliens are heading back to Mexico. Almost sounds like a joke the late night hosts would make during their monologues, doesn't it? As a result, when I first saw this last evening (thanks to whoever sent it to me with apologies for not being able to identify who it was!), I thought it had to be a…
What Time of Year Is It? (2007 Edition, Part
In 2005, I sensed that journalists in general prefer to call this time of the year in commerce that of "holiday shopping" instead of "Christmas shopping," but that when it came to people losing their jobs, they preferred to describe layoffs as relating to "Christmas."My instincts were proven correct that year and in 2006, so I chose to track the same items this year to look for any noticeable…
Investment Firm CEO: If We Have a Recession, Media Will Cause It
Since the stock and credit market turbulence began in July, NewsBusters has been informing readers that media continually predict recessions that never happen.On the sad flipside, bearishness in the press can become so pervasive that an economic downturn ends up being an unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecy.NewsBusters affiliate the Business and Media Institute made this very point in a late-…
Larry Summers's Tax Cut Plea Falls on Deaf Old Media Ears
When Larry Summers suggested in early 2005 that, as paraphrased by Slate's William Saletan, "innate differences between the sexes might help explain why relatively few women become professional scientists or engineers," the outcry was immediate, furious, and went to saturation level virtually overnight. The controversy ultimately led to his resignation a year later as Harvard President. On…
CBS ‘Early Show’ Touts ‘Historic’ Energy Bill
The Democrats were finally able to get something passed in Congress, a new energy bill that mandates car gas mileage and bans the incandescent light bulb, and on Wednesday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Julie Chen described it as, "Congress's historic move to get rid of gas guzzlers." Co-host Harry Smith began the "historic" theme at the top of the show: Later this morning, the president will sign a…
